Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch

Overview of this book

Real-World SRE is the go-to survival guide for the software developer in the middle of catastrophic website failure. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged on the frontline as businesses strive to maximize uptime. This book is a step-by-step framework to follow when your website is down and the countdown is on to fix it. Nat Welch has battle-hardened experience in reliability engineering at some of the biggest outage-sensitive companies on the internet. Arm yourself with his tried-and-tested methods for monitoring modern web services, setting up alerts, and evaluating your incident response. Real-World SRE goes beyond just reacting to disaster—uncover the tools and strategies needed to safely test and release software, plan for long-term growth, and foresee future bottlenecks. Real-World SRE gives you the capability to set up your own robust plan of action to see you through a company-wide website crisis. The final chapter of Real-World SRE is dedicated to acing SRE interviews, either in getting a first job or a valued promotion.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Real-World SRE
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Linux fundamentals


Linux is a group of operating systems. Originally released in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, Linux has grown to be the de facto operating system of servers. The Linux foundation claims that Linux servers were almost 80% of all servers running in 2014 (https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-foundation-finds-enterprise-linux-growing-at-windows-expense/). Linux also goes by the name GNU/Linux, because the GNU project created a lot of the utilities bundled with the Linux kernel in most Linux operating system distributions. This is all just dogma though. The key is that the Linux kernel has a few basic tenants and is pretty consistent between distributions. Whether you use Fedora, Centos, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, or something else, the following section should introduce you to the basics of your operating system.

Figure 1: A kernel is the core part of an operating system. It tends to provide the base interface to all hardware of a computer, especially in terms of managing CPU time and memory...